The following is a registry of completed doctoral dissertations in American Studies, American Ethnic Studies and Women’s Studies programs as reported by U.S. Ph.D. degree-granting institutions in the field. This list is based on requests to American Studies, American Ethnic Studies and Women’s Studies programs for lists of doctoral dissertations completed between July 1 2000 and June 30 2001. The survey was sent to forty universities. Twenty-eight were American Studies programs of which all twenty-eight replied. Seven were American Ethnic Studies programs of which three replied. Five were Women’s Studies programs of which two replied. Washington State University, Florida State University, Oklahoma State University, and the University of Illinois replied but had no completed dissertations to report. Several independently submitted dissertations are included from the following institutions (one U.S., two international): Columbia University (Department of Comparative Literature); Gauhati University; Szeged University. A total of 154 dissertations were reported.
The report contains entries whose titles suggest the broad range of topics and diverse methodologies that American Studies scholars are exploring. For abstracts of these and other dissertations completed this year by ASA members, please see the December 2001 American Quarterly.
Boston University (6)
Kerry Dean Carso. “Reading the Gothic: American Art and Architecture in the Age of Romantic Literature, 1800-1850.”
Paul D’Ambrosio. “Ralph Fasanella (1914-1917): The Making of a Working Class Artist.”
Thomas Andrew Denenberg. “Consumed by the Past: Wallace Nutting and the Invention of Old America.”
Jennifer R. Green. “Books and Bayonets: Class and Culture at Antebellum Military Academies.”
Laura Johnson. “Courting Justice: Marriage, Law and the American Novel, 1890-1925.”
Bradford D. Martin. “‘The Theatre is the Street’: Arts and Cultural Groups in the 1960’s.”
Bowling Green State University (19)
Solomon Davidoff. “Allusions to Popular Faith in C.S. Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia.”
Matthew A. Donahue. “The Message Behind the Beat: Social and Political Attitudes Expressed in American Rap and Punk Rock Music of the 1980’s and Early 1990’s.”
Kenneth R. Dvorak. “Terror in Detroit: The Rise and Fall of Michigan’s Black Legion.”
Kriss Ferluga. “X Marks What’s Not: Stereotypes and Strategies in the Construction of a Generational Subculture.”
Kyoko Kishimoto. “Race and History Wars in the 50th Anniversary of the End of World War II: A Comparative Analysis of the U.S. and Japanese Media.”
Anne Lacsamana. “An Examination of Filipino Mail Order Brides.”
Victoria Lees. “Heresy or Hearsay: Investigating the Documents of the Trials of Anne Hutchinson.”
Wayne Marshall. “Effable Names—A Philosophical inquiry Into How and Why We Name God.”
Christine Nerad. “Dressed for Rape: The Case Against the Female Body.”
Michael G. Robinson. “Genre From the Audience Perspective: Science Fiction.”
Julio Rodriquez. “Whiting Up: Masculinity and the Erasure of Color in Black Athletes.”
Bazan Romero. “Nuclear Colonization or Self-determination: A Study of the Planned MRS at the Mescalero Apache Reservation.”
Rufus Sanders. “William J. Seymour: Black Father of 20th Century Pentecostal Movement.”
Yvonne Sims. “From Mammie to Action Heroines: Female Empowerment in Black Popular Cinema.”
Juliann Sivulka. “Stronger than Dirt: A Cultural History of Advertising of Personal Hygiene in America, 1875 to 1940.”
Wayne Sneath. “Conspiracy Nation: Rightist Extremism in the 1990’s.”
John Streamas. “Japanese Americans and Cultures of Relocation.”
Molly J. Swiger. “Consuming ‘Third World’ Children: Constructing an American Self.”
Annette Taylor. “Legal Ramifications of Outside-Activity Restrictions on Journalists First Amendment.”
Brown University (7)
Marion Jane Coffey. “Conceiving a Social Movement: Pro-Choice Organizing Post: Roe vs. Wade.”
Shahara Brookins Drew. “Insiders and Outsiders: Process of African American Canon Formation.”
Kristen Petersen Farmelant. “Trophies of Grace: Religious Conversion and Americanization in Boston’s Immigrant Communities, 1890-1940.”
Renea Henry. “Tales From the Dark Side: Race Spectacle and American Television.”
Claudia Milian. “Breaking into the Borderlands: Double Consciousness, Latina and Latino Misplacements.”
Kirsten Ostherr. “Cinematic Prophylaxis: Globalization and Contagion in the Audiovisual Discourse of World Health.”
Cynthia Tolentino. “The Liberal, the Sociologist, and the Novelist: Narratives of Race and National Development in African American and Asian American Fiction of the 1940’s.”
University of California Berkeley (5)
Jill L. Esbenshade, “The ‘Social Accountability Contract’: Monitoring and Labor Relations in the Global Apparel Industry.”
Edward Graham Daves Rossell. “Compelling Vision: From Electric Light to Illuminating Engineering, 1880-1940.”
Caroline Streeter, “Ambiguous Bodies, Ambivalent Desires: The Morphing Mulatta Body in U.S. Culture, 1965-1999.”
Jennifer Vest, “Critical Indigenous Philosophy: Disciplinary Challenges Posed by African and Native American Epistemologies.”
Jonathan Yorba, “Picturing Miscegenation: Multiracial Imagery in American Art.”
Claremont Graduate University (4)
Frank Barajas. “Work and Leisure in LaColonia: Class Generation, and Inter-ethnic alliances among Mexicanos in Oxnard, California, 1890-1945.”
Kelsey Cass. “Bivouacs of the Dead: The Origin and Early Development of the United States Cemetery System.”
Jon DePriest. “Contain the Light: Team and the Evangelical Mission, 1890-1975.”
Arlene Michelle Sanchez Walsh. “El Aposento Alto: Searching for a Latino Pentecostal Identity.”
Columbia University (1)
John Peter Nathaniel Austin. “The Literary Compilation in Antebellum America: 1820-1850.”
Emory University (1)
Patrick T. Wehner. “Living in Style: Marketing, Media, and the Discovery of Lifestyles.”
Gauhati University (1)
Nandana Dutta. “The Use of the Metanarrative in the Short Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe.”
George Washington University (1)
Richard W. Tucker. “Brushstroke: Cultural Icon and Commercial Image.”
Harvard University (9)
Mary Bilder. “Salamanders and Sons of God: Transatlantic Legal Culture and Colonial Rhode Island.”
Alfred Brophy. “The Intersection of Property and Slavery in Southern Legal Thought: From Missouri Compromise Through the Civil War.”
Karen Flood. “Contemplating Corpses: The Dead Body in American Culture.”
Martha Nadell. “Nor Can I Reduce This Experience to a Medium: Race, Art, and Literature in America, 1920’s-1940’s.”
Linda Prince. “A Quiet Inoffensive and Useful Race: Blacks and the Etiquette of Interraciality in Boston from Slavery to Freedom.”
Judy Richardson. “Possessions: The History and Uses of Haunting in the Hudson Valley.”
Michael Soto. “Literary History and the Age of Jazz: Generation Renaissance, and American Literary Modernism.”
Shirley Thompson. “The Passing of a People: Creoles of Color in Mid-Nineteenth Century New Orleans.”
Michael Washington. “Beautiful Nightmare: Coltrane, Jazz, and American Culture.”
University of Hawaii (4)
Daniel Dodd. “The Charity State: The Marginalization of American Social Policy in the Post-War West.”
Beverly Keever. “Patterns of News Bias: The Case of Native Hawaiian U.S.-Affiliated Pacific Islanders.”
Sridevi Menon. “Discursive Realms and Colonial Practice: Contrapuntal Studies of Race in Colonial India and the United States.”
Lori Pierce. “Constructing American Buddhisms: Discourses of Race and Religion in Territorial Hawaii.”
Indiana University (9)
Ian Duncan Anderson. “This is Our Music: Free Jazz, cultural Hierarchy, and the Sixties.”
David Jeffrey Carlson. “Institutions of Self: Law, Colonialism and Autobiography in Nineteenth Century America.”
Laura Ruth Fingerson. “Adolescent Body Politics: Interaction, Power, and Agency.”
Stephen Edward Kircher. “The Limits of Irreverence: Sick Humor and Sallre in America, 1950-1964.”
Pyungho Kim. “Persistence of Failure: The Case of Interactive TV, 1977-1999.”
Meg Ann Meneghel-McDonald. “Becoming a Heretic: Hannah Whitall Smith, Quakerism, and the 19th Century Holiness Movement.”
Martha Peterson Taysom. “The Hope of the Great Community: The Communal of Josiah Royce.”
Janelle Lyn Walker. “Saving Maxwell Street: People, Power and the Politics of Urban Aesthetics in Chicago.”
Douglas Leo Winlarski. “All Manner of Error and Delusion: Josiah Cotton and the Religious Transformation of Southeastern New England, 1700-1770.”
University of Iowa (7)
Michael Augspurger. “An Economy of Abundant Beauty: Fortune and the Culture of Corporate Liberalism.”
Sarah Fields. “Female Gladiators: Gender, Law, and Contact Sport in America.”
Hanley Kanar. “A Quiet and Contented Term: Early Coed Medical Training and the Notes of J. Sarah Braunwarth.”
Allison McCracken. “Real Men Don’t Sing: Crooning and American Culture: 1928-1933.”
Lori Vermas. “The National Trees: Celebrating the Sequoias—Their Trunks, Roots, Stump, Bark—and Their Depiction as Big Trees in America, 1852-1944.”
Mike Wiseman. “Rising on the Levee: Stories after the flood and reconstruction of place.”
Jane Simonsen. “Making Home Work: Race, Gender and the Uses of American Domestic Space, 1850-1920.”
University of Kansas (12)
Mary Alcocer-Berriozabal. “The Structure and Development of the American Expatriate Community in Mexico City Since World War II.”
Jean Attebury. “Language for the Land: Public Goods and Prairie Parks.”
Maria Isabel Fraga. “The Role of Action Films in the Process of Globalization.”
Suzanne Heck. “Indian Identity and Cultural Renewal: A Case Study of the Sac and Fox Nation.”
William Stewart Lawler. “The Power of Performance and the Performance of Power: A Master/Mistress Trope for Black Cultural Differences in the African Diaspora.”
David McElwain. “The Only Dance in Iowa: A Cultural History of Iowa Six Player Girls’ Basketball.”
Carol Matthews. “Taken: Constructions of Race, Biology and Colonization in Alien Abduction Narratives.”
Janet Rose. “‘And ears don’t count’: Body Piercing in America and Other Variations on the Theme of Belonging.”
Moussa Sissoko. “The Impact of the Peace Corps Experience on Returned Volunteers: A Case Study of Peace Corps Mali Returned Volunteers.”
Nancy Sheley. “‘Bringing Light to Life’: The Art of Agnes Pelton (1881-1961).”
Douglas L. Sudhoff. “A Model of Deviance in Television News.”
Pia Theilman. “Hotbeds: Black-White Love and Its Representations in Selected Contemporary Novels from the United States.”
University of Maryland (4)
Ellen Rooney Hughes. “Machines for Better Bodies: A Cultural History of Exercise Machines, 1830-1950.”
Arlene Blumenthal Kelly. How Deaf Women Construct Teaching, Language and Culture, and Gender: An Ethnographic Study of ASL Teachers.”
David M. Silver. “Cyberspace Under Construction: Design, Discourses and Diversity in the Blacksburg Electronic Village and the Seattle Community Network.”
Ronald Zurawik. “The Jews of Prime Time: Ethnicity, Self-Censorship and Assimilation in Network Television, 1949-1999.”
University of Massachusetts (2)
Athena B. Devlin. “Between Profits and Primitivism: Rehabilitating White Middle-Class manhood in America, 1880-1917.”
Christopher Hanlon. “Pragmatism and the Unconscious: Language and Subject in Psychoanalytic Theory, Pragmatism Philosophy, and American Narrative.”
University of Michigan (4)
Daryl J. Maeda. “Forging Asian American Identity: Race, Culture and the Asian American Movement, 1968-1975.”
Kate Masur. “Reconstructing the Nation’s Capital: The Politics of Race and Citizenship in the District of Columbia, 1862-1878.”
Jonathan Michel Metzl. “The Freud of Prozac, Tracing Psychotropic Medications through American Culture, 1950-2001.”
L. Ariella Zeller. “Jewish Women Remembering Their Bodies: A Feminist Ethnography in Toledo, Ohio.”
Michigan State University (3)
Teresa Trupiano Barry. “The Rhetorics of Representation: Race, Gender, and Intermarriage in the Frontier Fiction of Ann S. Stephens, 1838-1865.”
Jean Gazel. “Building Community on Campus: The interdependent Theory and Practice of the Multi Racial Unity Living Experience—MRULE.”
Maria Quinlan Leiby. “Michigan Museums Interpret the Automobile, 1929-1995.”
University of Minnesota (3)
MaryAnn Dickar. “Kids in the Hall: Negotiating Space, Time and Language at the School Formerly Known as Erasmus Hall.”
Andrea Jule Sachs. “Bread, Justice, Dignity, and Democracy: Welfare Activism, Single Motherhood, and the National Welfare Rights Organization, 1965-1975.”
Mary Ellen Shaw. “Loving Her Fiercely and Pragmatically: Spiritual Autobiography and Self-Help Writing in American Goddess-Centered Religion.”
University of New Mexico(7)
Robert Anderson. “Voices of Steel: New Left and Worker Resistance to Steel Industry Restructuring, Western Pennsylvania, 1979-1986.”
Cynthia Chavez. “Negotiated Representations: Pueblo Artists and Culture.”
Tami Harbolt. “The Broken Bond: The Cultural Construction of the Shelter.”
Cara Marianna. “Abortion Narratives: Mapping the Terrain of a Collective Story.”
Patricia Moore. “Santos de Santa Fe: Mediators of Family and Faith, Culture and Place.”
Patrick Pynes. “Erosion, Extraction, Reciprocation: An Environmental History of the Navajo Nation’s Ponderosa Pine Forest.”
Claude Stephenson. “A Comparative Analysis of Matachines Music and Its History and Dispersion in the American Southwest.”
State University of New York—Buffalo(1)
Edward Valandra. “The Lakota Response to Public Law 83-280: 1950-1959.”
New York University (7)
Roger Bruce Brasell. “Imag(in)ing the American South in Documentary Film and Video.”
Bridget Brown, “The Terror is Real: The History and Politics of Alien Abduction.”
Donette Francis, “Cosmopolitan Patriots: West Indian Intellectuals Between Home and Metropole.”
Sandra Friedman, “Racing with Catastrophe: Representations of the Holocaust and American Jewish Anxiety.”
Andrew Schroeder, “Dispatches from the Cinema Wars: Strategies of Culture in the New Hollywood, 1967-1981.”
Micol Seigel, “The Point of Comparison: Transnational Racial Construction, Brazil and the United States, 1918-1933.
Frederick Selch, “Instrumental Accompaniments for Yankee Hymn Tunes.”
Purdue University (4)
Andaluna Borcila. “Post-Cold War Encounters with Eastern Europe: Sites in Return and Trajectories of Desire.”
Adelyn Fullerton. “Out of the Moral Thicket: The American Christian Religious Leaders and the Persian Gulf War.”
H. Clark Maddux. “Ramist Rationality, Covenant Theology and Puritan Poetics.”
Portia Boulware Ransom. “Black Love and the Harlem Renaissance: The Politics of Intimacy in the Novels of Nella Larsen, Jessie Redmon Fauset, and Zora Neale Hurston.”
St. Louis University (7)
James Dohle. “Rise and Fall of JROTC: A Study of Two St. Louis Schools.”
Jane Ferry. “Flavors of Culture: Semiotic Reading of Food and Film.”
Patricia Gregory. “Women’s Experience of Reading in St. Louis Book Clubs.”
Christine Harper. “The Water Wizard: John F. Wixford and the Purification of St. Louis Water.”
Miriam Joseph. “Perceived Culture Influences on Generativity as Defined by Childless Women.”
Carole Knight. “Survival of the Forest: The Evolution of Forest Park as a Reflection of the Social and cultural Dynamics of St. Louis.”
Mark Krueger. “The Influence of the 1960’s Counter-Cultural Values of Individualism, Anti-Materialism, and Community on a Contemporary Intentional Community.”
Szeged University (Hungary) (1)
Iren Annus. “The Constitution of Mormon Identity.”
University of Texas at Austin (7)
Elizabeth Browyn Boyd. “Southern Beauty: Performing Femininity in an American Region.”
Carolyn de la Pena. “Powering the Modern Body: Theories of Energy Transfer in American Medicine, Science, and Technology, 1880-1930.”
Dwonna Goldstone. “‘In the Shadow of the South’: The Unspoken History of Racial Integration at the University of Texas at Austin.”
Elizabeth Pollard Grayson. “Irish American Catholic Women in the 19th Century.”
Sang-Dawn Lee. “Big Brother, Little Brother: The American Influence on Korean Culture in the Lyndon B. Johnson Years.”
Marureen Reed. “Homesickness: Untold Stories of New Mexican Women and Multiculturalism, 1930-1965.”
Mark Sawin. “Raising Kane: The Creation and Consequences of Fame in Antebellum America, or The Thrilling and Tragic Narrative of Elisha Kent Kane and his Transformation into Dr. Kane, the Hero of the Romantic Age.”
Union Institute (1)
Loraine Hutchins, “Erotic Rites: A Cultural Analysis of Contemporary U.S. Sacred Sexuality Trends and Traditions.”
College of William and Mary (7)
Crystal Anderson. “Far From ‘Everybody’s Everything’: Literary Tricksters in African American and Chinese American Novels.”
William Tynes Cowan. “The Slave in the Swamp: Disrupting the Plantation Narrative.”
Susan Glisson. “Neither Bedecked Nor Bebosomed: Women’s Leadership and Organizing Strategies in the Struggle for Freedom.”
Marykate McMaster. “A Publisher’s Hand: Creative Gambles and Cultural Leadership by Moses Dresser Philips in Antebellum America.”
Megan Haley-Newman. “Vermin-Killers: Pest control in the Colonial Chesapeake.”
Alexandra Subramanian. “Katherine Ann Porter and Publishers.”
Robin Veder. “How Gardening Pays: Leisure, Labor and Luxury in Nineteenth-Century Transatlantic Culture.”
Yale University (10)
Jayna Jennifer Brown. “Babylon Girls: African American Women Performers and the Making of the Modern.”
Prudence Denise Cumberbatch.“Working for the Race: The Transformation of the Civil Rights Struggle in Baltimore, 1929-1945.”
Jennifer Rae Greeson. “The Figure of the South and the Imagination of Nation in the United States.”
Lisa Diane McGill. “Caribbean American Narratives and the Second Generation.”
Gloria Silvana Monti. “This Ain’t You: Staging Impersonations of Race in American Cinema.”
Nicole Heidi Parisier. “Novel Work: Theater and Journalism in the Writing of Theodore Dreiser, Edith Wharton and Willa Cather.”
Scott Andrew Saul. “Freedom Is, Freedom Ain’t: Jazz and the Making of the Sixties.”
Karin Michele Thomas. “Traveling Eyes: African American Travelers Create a World, 1789-1930.”
Veronica Maria Tomasic. “To Own Their Rooms: Representations of the Inner Life in an Age of Transition, Late Thirties to Early Fifties.”
Brendan Michael Walsh. “A New World Proletariat: Expropriation, Transience, and Redemption in Twentieth-Century U.S. Narrative.”